Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Can Find You

I realized that in all my posts talking about blogging and Pushing People to Blog as a learning tool, I had never specifically blogged about how you find readers - or more appropriately - what should you do so that potential readers can find you. So here are a few specific suggestions to make sure that readers can find you:

Engage any blogger by posting and linking to them (do item #1 first). They won't respond every time, but they do quite often.

Comment and link to your post in the comments on blogs. It's better to link directly in a new post on the topic, but if you've already posted on a related issue, feel free to link to your blog in a comment. (Make sure you know how the anchor tag works.)

Ask Questions and Make Openings Clear in your posts in order to get responses.

Post Controversial Topics, but make sure you believe your position and can take the heat.

Participate in Blog Carnivals is the Work Learning carnival still going?

Twitter about it, especially to twitter groups such as the upcoming TK09 group

Make sure to include a link to your blog in email footer, social network profiles, etc.

Include links to your posts (when relevant) to discussion groups

Make sure your blog is search engine friendly. Good titles and URLs are a must.

The usual caveats that this takes time and you had better be first focused on personal learning, but hopefully this will help make it so that readers can find you.

4 comments:

Thanks for this refresher and I'll admit new ideas for me. I did not know about blog carnivals, I also didn't think too highly about putting my blog link on emails...seemed a little too high on the self-promotion scale. I am going to give both a try to see how these options work for my blog.

Another idea, add a blog widget to your Linked In or Facebook profile. This will display your latest posts within your profile. FYI: Keep your profile open for anyone to view, allowing all/more to see your blog posts within Linked In or Facebook.

5 -Approach post writing from the story point of view, incorporating personal stories into your range of post topics - I just learnt about that one :-)

As I said, there are principles that may be breached by following a pattern of post writing that addresses these points above. It's a bit like the singer who'd rather sing her own stuff than stuff that people ask to hear.

@Tracy, if you don't feel comfortable about adding your blog, then add a LinkedIn profile link which lists your blog. Definitely LinkedIn profile is relevant and quite useful to have in email signatures.

@Jeff - good suggestion.

@Ken -

1. On the name, I agree making it catchy is good, but so is a name that helps a little bit with SEO and quick recognition what the blog is about. In other words, it's good to have a term or terms that relate to your topic.

2 & 3 Your suggestion on titles and headers for searches is good. However, I would focus more on title.

About Me

Dr. Tony Karrer works as a part-time CTO for startups and midsize software companies - helping them get product out the door and turn around technology issues. He is considered one of the top technologists in eLearning and is known for working with numerous startups including being the original CTO for eHarmony for its first four years. Dr. Karrer taught Computer Science for eleven years. He has also worked on projects for many Fortune 500 companies including Credit
Suisse, Royal Bank of Canada, Citibank, Lexus, Microsoft, Nissan,
Universal, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, Fidelity
Investments, Symbol Technologies and SHL Systemhouse. Dr. Karrer was
valedictorian at Loyola Marymount University, attended the University
of Southern California as a Tau Beta Pi fellow, one of the top 30
engineers in the nation, and received a M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer
Science. He is a frequent speaker at industry and academic events.